Preparing For Rohan

Howdy! With Riders of Rohan just around the corner I thought I’d share with you the things I’ve been doing in game to prepare for launch and the journey to level 85. From the important to the mundane, I hope I’ve made things easier for myself by getting prepared early and by posting it here, here’s to hoping it might give you some ideas and help you too (if its not too late!)

1. Clearing The Darn Vault!

My vault is a mess. Not just Adhrean’s, but across all my characters. With the release of the new expansion on the horizon, expect to pick up tons of new items from cosmetics, crafting materials, new LI’s, new tier crafting reputation emblems and so much more. So over the past few weeks I’ve been clearing it up, taking out the space-hoggers that wasn’t going to be useful to me. It was tough parting with some items that has sentimental value to me, but the space was important and the item was not. (Isengard Prisoner Cosmetic Set). Since I already bought the Barter Wallet when it came out, I’ll be saving myself a whole bunch of space in the vault when receiving new area tokens/trophies/ and other goodies. So if you have not picked up the Barter Wallet and have a bunch of TP, I’d advise you to go for it. It’ll easily clear up at least a bag worth of space in your vault.

Vaults can be a messy business

2. Crafting Guild Emblems

The expansion brings with it a new crafting tier, The Eastemnet. This also means there will be another tier of reputation to max with your crafting guild. Thus, since the turn of the year, I have been crafting all these reputation emblems and tokens on all my max guilded toons with the hopes of hitting the cap a few weeks after launch. So among the first things I’ll be doing is to head to my guild’s reputation recipe vendor and buy those new recipes. I’ll want to get my hands on new guild crafted armour and weapons so this step is an important one for all you craftaholics out there with the same intention. Start crafting out rep items!

3. Grinding Deeds for Virtues

Not a step I enjoyed doing but it needed to be done. My main is a Champion after all and I knew I was going to be able to kill stuff quick so grinding with that mentality did help. A little. Since he’s the first that’s crossing the border south, I needed all his virtues to hit 14. I have been saving some Slayer Deed Accelerators that were handed out as free samples from the LOTRO Store and used them specifically for my Champ’s virtue grinding. Need a head’s up on the weekly Store Sale and if there’s a free sample of the week too? Then you need to be following Casual Stroll To Mordor pronto. My tip for making this deed grinding a tad-bit easier is to bring a friend or two. Possibly even PUG it. Mention the virtues you want to max and there will be people responding who wants to attain them too. While deeding, play your favorite music in the background. Maybe even an audiobook ( My current favorite method of grinding slayer deeds.) If the slayer deed is on-level, try experimenting with your class’s skills, skill rotations etc. Give yourself something to think about instead of the usual “Why am I doing this again?” rhetoric. =P

Virtues: Like them or hate them, its best to grind them out for Rohan. You’ll need them.

4. Harvesting Relics, Shards & XP Runes

Another chore that is necessary evil. There is a quest in the middle of Galtrev that I have been doing regularly called the Forges of Isengard. It is a daily repeatable solo instance offered by the NPC Bron. It’s a rather simple instance to complete and should not take longer than 10 minutes. The rewards are all decent. I pick relics on days when I feel I need them, and the Compendium of Middle Earth III every Monday to craft a Flawless Numenorean Sceptre, that allows me to trade with my Weaponsmith guild leader for a Sealed Device of Battle. When deconstructed, the crafted relic can then be refined into 700 or so shards which is a really hefty amount. If accumulated for months, your shards pool must look pretty impressive and you should be able to aim high for those wretched T8 relics or for the new Rohan ones that will be out soon. Another thing I’ve been doing to farm relics by the truckload is to run Stoneheight on T2 with a partner. On average, we picked up at least 15 sealed relics each.

Try and make it a habit to visit Bron on a daily basis for a daily dose of relics, xp runes or to snag that Compendium from completing the Forges.

5. Horsed Around

This is among the first things I did after pre-ordering RoR. The two deeds that are available for completing the horse session play quests may seem tedious at first but once I discovered that there was skill reward on the shorter one for the War Steed it was a no brainer. It required me to complete all the horse session play quests, which took approximately a week due to the random couple of quests handed out each day. That should be your priority if you want that handy skill. Do 60 quests and you get an awesome looking cloak and a nifty title to boot. Checked and checked.

Look who I found.

This will come in handy at some point.

6. Being a Nosey Hobbit!

When you’re enthusiastic about the new expansion, the last thing you want is to be left out in the dark without information on what to expect in terms of changes etc. So I’ve kept myself informed by skim-scanning the forums regularly. Another good place to check back often is the Developer Diary page. Two thumbs up to the Turbine Devs for doing such an amazing job of pumping out Diaries as frequent as they did, informing us of the many changes and tweaks that will be implemented come Rohan in October. Want to keep abreast of it all? Then here’s the place to be!

There are a few more things I would like to do before launch and as we get closer to launch, I guess I’ll churn out another post in addition to this. Hoped this either gave you folks some idea or set you in the right track in time for the new expansion. Remember, it’s not too late! If any of you have been busy preparing for Rohan in ways not mentiond above, please do share them in the comments. Cheers everyone!

Thanks! Yeah it’s a nightmare task especially across toons that are 75 and just waiting to pop into Rohan :S. I’m hoping there’s going to be further expansions for vault space with Rohan coming out, even if it costs more TP than the usual.